Air cargo yields continue to climb, but how do GSAs perform?

AMSTERDAM: April 03, 2018. Analyst WorldACD says air cargo yields climbed to US$1.91 in February 2018, one percent above the previous month and 23.1 percent higher than February 2017:

“Given the aftermath of Chinese New Year (CNY), worldwide year-over-year (YoY) volume growth in February (+4.4 percent) was way below the growth reported for January, resulting in a combined growth for the year's first two months of 6.95 percent YoY: a good start of the year by any standard (except by the standard of the extraordinary year 2017!).

“Yet, we still reserve our final judgment, as past experience has taught us that the post-CNY effects may last as long as three weeks, in other words into March. The origin [traffic] Asia Pacific and Americas grew more than average in these two months (+9.3 percent and +8.4 percent YoY respectively). Europe, Central & South America and Africa were the best destinations (+9.5 percent, +8.5 percent and +8.4 percent YoY respectively).

“Colombia, Ecuador and Kenya - in this order - are the world's flower growing powerhouses; together exporting about 75 percent of the world's airborne flowers. February, the month of Valentine's Day, brought the largest volume increase in flower exports from Ecuador (+11 percent YoY), followed by Kenya (+9.2 percent) and Colombia (+7.1 percent) – the last realizing the largest YoY US$ yield increase of 14.6 percent.

“More than 85 percent of these exports went to the USA and Western Europe.

“Worldwide yields rose by 19.9 percent in US$ and by 3.8 percent in € in the first two months. The YoY oil price increase, as well as the lower value of the US$, remain important elements in this comparison. But there is more to interpret [in] these figures.

“Take the high-yielding markets from Asia Pacific to Europe & North America. Strong pre-CNY demand caused these large markets to grow much more in February than in January, thus boosting the average yield worldwide.

“Thus, the lower YoY volume growth in February was certainly not caused by the abovementioned large markets. The main reasons were (1) Asia Pacific as a destination showed a negative growth YoY, in particular to Hong Kong, Eastern China and Taiwan; and (2) originating Europe [traffic], having shown a 12 percent YoY increase in January, fell back to a paltry 0.5 percent YoY in February.

“WorldACD is one of the few organizations researching GSA-performance, which enables us to report on GSA-developments worldwide. Around 23 percent of air cargo volume is sold via GSA's. This percentage has remained fairly stable over the past years.

“Not surprisingly the percentage is much lower for the world's top 100 country-level O&D [lanes] - some 13 percent - than for the smaller markets (27 percent). We have data for 800 GSA's on record, together operating under more than 1,000 different brand names.

“They are mainly active in Europe and North America, where they take over 50 percent of all GSA-business. As the GSA-market is much more fragmented in Asia Pacific and the Middle East & South Asia, they take only about 14 percent and 19 percent respectively, whilst they are virtually non-existent in Africa and Central & South America.

“The largest group of GSAs remains WFC (World Freight Company), with brands like Air Logistics, ATC, Kales and Hermes Aviation. Number 2 (ECS) has lately been most active in acquisition. YoY volume growth for the top 10 in 2017 varied from 1.0 percent to 54 percent.

“In the top 100 country pairs, in 2017 GSAs produced yields for their principals on average 12 percent below the yields generated by airlines doing their own sales. In 2016, the gap was 10 percent.”